


Windows

by bizzylizzy



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Ghosts, Terminal Illnesses, Unreliable Narrator, dying by inches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 10:52:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3171950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bizzylizzy/pseuds/bizzylizzy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last days of Uchiha Itachi, and the two men who share it with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Windows

“Itachi, get away from the window.”

Itachi leans his head against the window, breathing out clouds on the cold glass.

“Itachi.” Kisame leans around him and pulls the curtains shut. When Itachi doesn’t move away from the window Kisame hefts him like a child and carries him back to the bedroom, tossing him on the bed like a child. He locks the bedroom door and Itachi hears him go outside.

“He was out there.” It’s breakfast. Morning. Well, not really. Kisame’s poaching eggs sometime in the dark. Itachi leans on the doorframe and closes his eyes, listening and smelling like a blind mole. He should grow whiskers.

“You went out and saw him,” Itachi clarifies.

“I went out.” Kisame flips something. “I didn’t see him.”

Itachi opens his eyes and the world is blurry.

“You should get some sleep.”

“What time is it?”

“Noon.” Kisame sets something down. Something hisses.

“Where did someone like you learn how to cook?” Itachi asks, gripping the door frame tightly and trying to make the world come into greater focus as his head throbs with the effort and tries to slip into the Sharingan.

“When I got tired of eating raw food I taught myself how to cook. I didn’t have a mother to cook for me,” Kisame reminds Itachi, and they have had this conversation sometime before, but Itachi’s memories are disturbingly foggy.

“Itachi,” Kisame’s voice isn’t sharp, but it’s insistent. “Get away from the window.” Itachi presses his aching fingertips to the glass, feeling disconnect as he lets his sight slip back into being, feels the throb start up in his head as even this vision frays and blurs the world a little. Itachi takes  a short breath as his heart labors.

“You said there was nothing to see.” Before Itachi can make the image outside stop dancing with light, Kisame’s yanked the curtains closed again. Itachi lets himself be pulled away, closing his eyes and allowing himself to be pushed back down onto the bed. He takes the basin he’s given and dutifully wretches up the medicinal herbs and teas he’s choked down in the past twelve hours.

“If you don’t sleep, you’re going to die in this room.”

It’s not compassion. Itachi’s not sure he would call them friends, or call Kisame concerned or caring. It’s an odd symbiosis they’ve built, and it’s more the human reluctance to give up what is known than anything else that makes Kisame go through the motions of compassion and caring like making Itachi tea when his body hurts too much to get out of bed or cooking food Itachi won’t eat.

It’s not compassion. It’s not caring.

Itachi is dying, and he will not consider what he is leaving or how anyone will feel. He will not be missed. Not with real emotion.

“I am losing track of time.” Itachi’s sitting on the bed. Kisame’s on the bed as well, stretched out of sprawled or some long shape that dips the bed. Itachi remembers Kisame saying something about their being only one room left. One bed. But it had a little cook stove.

“You haven’t slept in fifty...four hours. I’m not surprised.” Kisame sounds wry.

“Is that a record?” Itachi asks as he stands. He gets the feeling Kisame doesn’t even look.

“Itachi-san, come away from the window and get back in bed.”

“He’s out there.”

“There’s no one out there.”

“I can see him.”

“Itachi, you can’t see anything.” It’s true enough, and Itachi lets Kisame broad hands draw him back, bundling him back into the bed where he lays still and stares. He should be tired, he knows. He’d dying in tiny stages, but he cannot rest. He simple exists, beyond exhaustion and simply accented by pain.

He doesn’t sleep until Kisame doses him with sedatives.

Itachi wakes up and he can see. The world is perfectly clear. Crisp. As he sits up, nothing hurts. Someone’s by his bed, and as Itachi turns his head to tell Kisame “thank you.” It’s a strange thing to consider the number of times he’s thanked Kisame for forceful medical care. For someone so adept at illusion, Itachi so clings to some delusions.

Shisui sits almost prim, eyes bright and orange in hand. He’s peeling it with his hands, plunging his nail in to break the skin and then peeling away the bright orange rind to reveal the soft white membrane inside. He’s absorbed in this task, tongue caught between his teeth and poking out the corner of his mouth. His skin is a pleasant nutty brown, a little flushed. He’s got pink healing skin on all of his knuckles, and his nose is cut. His wild hair is unbrushed, and Itachi swears there is a stick in it.

“Oh.” The air smells strongly of orange.

Shisui looks up. His mouth curves. His eyes crinkle. Itachi feels like he’s been punched in the chest as all air runs from his lungs at the sight of the two perfectly brown eyes scrunching with the force of Shisui’s smile.

“Oh?” It’s Shisui’s voice, smooth and curling and thick. “Oh?”

Itachi tries to take a breath for another word, but he cough and wretches. First aid has never been Kisame’s strong point, but he knows a few tricks to get someone to breathe again. Itachi’s body spasms. Everything is cold and dim and blurred. His body is in agony, exhausted despite his rest. Kisame’s rough knuckled hands are poised on Itachi’s body, waiting without anxiety to see if Itachi is back or is he’s still trying to wander away to the dead.

Itachi coughs and gasps, and it’s easy enough to pretend it’s because of the pain.

“I don’t know why I want to die anymore.” Itachi actually feels better today. He’s bundled in blankets and drinking his tea. Kisame has some kind of soup set out. Kisame’s eating a heartier meal, and it strikes Itachi as ridiculously domestic. He feels  ashamed of what he’d turned the fearsome killer into, like making a tiger come inside when it rains and be careful when crossing the street.

“I’ve never wanted to die, so I’m not the person to ask.” Kisame doesn’t sound irritated as he should. Itachi suspects he’s going stir crazy, and he won’t leave to find other human companionship because Itachi did stop breathing not too long ago. Itachi comforts himself with the fact that Kisame won’t have to put up with him much longer. Itachi shifts his papery hands on the cup. They’re thin now, knobby and bony like an old man’s. There’s a certain sparse beauty to that, he supposes. There’s a certain tinge of wastefulness in his mouth as he considers how young he is and how much older he could have lived to be.

Suddenly young hands with blunted fingers cover his. There are the pink scarred knuckles, the scabs and dirt and gnawed fingernails. There is the scar Itachi placed with his own kunai. These are the knuckles he kissed with a childish devotion he didn’t understand. Before he can look for a face, Itachi feels the warmth. He startles and drops the cup of tea. It hits his knee and spills even as Kisame moves to catch up. Itachi jerks, scalded. Kisame yanks the sodden blanket away, but it’s too late. Itachi has burnt his knee and thigh and even his hands.

“You saw him,” Itachi demands, and Kisame looks up, blanket in hand and a crease between his brows. Itachi feels his heart shudder and turns his head.

Standing there across from him, wide smile, bare feet planted on the floor, flashing eyes and a laughing mouth, is Shisui. He’s not wet. Not mauled by Danzou’s aspirations. He isn’t anything but there, watching. Waiting.

It is not until Kisame makes him sit down that Itachi realizes he is standing. Shisui pads across the room and kneels down. He picks up the cup and hands it to Itachi, who takes it. When he looks into the cup, he realizes it’s perfectly clear, as is Shisui. He realizes the cup is filled with a familiar acidic poison, one for a quick, merciful death.

“Itachi-san, don’t look at it,” Kisame commands with a gentleness Itachi doesn’t understand or want. Itachi closes his eyes and presses his hands deep into them, watching the light bloom behind them and feeling warm hands stroke his hair as no one has since he drowned his desires in a river.

“I don’t know how much of a fight it will be, but you’ll make it there,” Kisame grunts as they walk along. Itachi’s Sharingan aided sight isn’t very sharp. he stumbles and weaves, but Kisame keeps him on track. He could follow Kisame with no sight in any weather.

“I…” Itachi has to pause to breathe. Kisame waits, patient as if this is just part of his life now.  Itachi wonders at what his illness has turned them both into, and if Kisame realizes all the gradual changes Itachi’s condition has worked on him.

“I’m sorry.”

Kisame stays where he is, already at the bottom of the rise Itachi had only crested. “Men who are truly sorry change their behavior.” It’s mocking. Something Itachi said to Kisame once. Itachi licks his lips.

“Then what are you sorry for?” Itachi asks.

“Don’t you need a conscience to be sorry?” It’s another old remark making a last appearance. Itachi wonders if they must come full circle like this. He feels a pressure on his back, urging him on. Urging him down the hill and onward.

Itachi waves it away. As he’s ignored Kisame’s requests to stay away from the windows, he ignores the request to hurry to his death. To end this. If Kisame’s been so changed by watching Itachi gradually sink into death, Itachi can only imagine how distressed the unchanging spirit of his dead cousin must be. Still, Itachi holds his ground.

“Then why have you changed?” Itachi asks. His lips taste cold. His mouth tastes like blood.

Kisame stands where he is. Itachi feels the pressure increase. Go.

“Itachi-san. You don’t have much time left.” The words are an evasion. Itachi holds his ground. feels the mutter of his heart and the crunch of his lungs. Tastes sick copper in the back of his throat. With a deep sigh turned cough, Itachi starts his way down. Kisame waits until the descent is complete and leads the way again, onward and upward.

“There is a ‘too late’ for some things,” Kisame adds as they go. This is all they say until Itachi finally stands at the crossroad. At the end, and now he goes on alone. He gives Kisame a bow. Thanks him quietly, and does not think what a change means in a man or how his break with this world will not be as neat and clean as he envisioned.

Selfishly, he is glad.

Shisui, for his part, walks along beside Itachi now. He’s warm and silent, radiating something else and something better as they leave Kisame behind. It is Shisui who sits that last vigil as they wait for Sasuke, and Itachi remembers the bitter emotions that came with Shisui’s resolve for his death. He remembers how they punched into his chest and heart, hurting worse than any blow.

He wonders if it’s worse to feel that all at once, or gradual over the years. He wonders how suffocating in minutes compares to slowly drowning over months.

Now Sasuke is here, and Shisui is gone.

Itachi stands one last time.

And smiles.

 

 


End file.
